Saturday, October 26, 2019

Interesting Discussion


A great, short read!  Check out the rest at the link!  Interesting Discussion:  ~Vanessa

Strangely Enough, With a Book Agent…

Civil as I could keep it on my side. Honest, I was a good boy, for the most part. But my normal blunt self.

(And no, I will not tell you who I had the discussion with.)

Something came from this discussion that I thought I had better remind folks about here.

If you have a friend who is looking at a book agent, ask these questions of that friend…



Interesting Discussion:



Wednesday, January 2, 2019

Stay Away From Traditional Book Publishing

If you have aspirations of writing, please click the link to read the whole article!  ~Vanessa



Stay Away From Traditional Book Publishing:

Yes, I Know That is a Dream for Many…

But it is a horrid (and I mean horrid beyond words) path for writers now in 2018.



But Dean, how can you say that? You first published with traditional publishing, right? Yes, I sold my first novel in 1987 and did my last work for them in 2008. I did 106 books (that I can remember) through traditional big-five book publishing. I am pretty convinced that even by my  math, most of that was last century.



Let me repeat that. Last century. You know, dial phones hooked to a wall with cords, no internet, no email. That century.



Yet traditional book publishing hasn’t changed in the slightest from those old dial-up days and writers still want to work with them. Stuns me.



We are almost to 2019 and times do change. I know some of you who had dreams of publishing in traditional big-five publishing have had the dream since last century when they were the only game in town. It is time to change that dream and get moving with your writing. Go buy a smart phone, in other words.



Why tonight on this topic? Because I sadly saw not one, but two comments today from writers with this old thinking. One writer was on their fifth draft and ready to send off the manuscript to an agent after working on it for six years. I wrote about 70 different books in the last six years. Another writer’s comment was that they were on their second rewrite from an agent.



Shudder.



So just to preach to the choir here (for the most part) and maybe make a few people angry who still have the fairy-dust dream of being anointed by a gatekeeper in a windowless office in a big corporation in New York, I thought I would just quickly list eight major reasons to avoid traditional book publishing. (Traditional short fiction publishers are great, for the most part. No issue with them. I am talking big-five book publishers.)



Stay Away From Traditional Book Publishing: